The Poison of Parental Alienation
My Mother, born in Poland but raised in France, was famous for her malapropisms. She would say, “hahatack” instead of “heart attack”. She called my first boyfriend a “bump” instead of a “bum”. And when taken by surprise, she would exclaim, “Oh, my godness” instead of Oh, my goodness!" I think in this last example, her verbal mistake was actually most accurate.
There was a time when I was losing my God-ness by disconnecting from my goodness.
What do we know about goodness as a human value?
We feel the goodness of a person when we experience someone letting us go first in the grocery line. (We all want to get out of there, now that our cart is full, and our stomachs are often empty.) We witness goodness when we see a young child crouch down to pet the dog while looking up with a smile. We hear goodness when a waitress patiently explains the menu while we know she has repeated herself many times before. It doesn’t seem to take much to be a person who chooses goodness. Goodness is generosity and kindness and doing the right thing. It is defined as a virtue that we can learn by behaving with principled guidelines.
In the adult world, we are challenged at every turn as to whether we walk the path of goodness. What do you do when you are walking hurriedly down the street and a baby reflexively drops her pacifier right in your path? Oh wait. That might be too easy for you to do good. In traffic, do you give that car in the next lane some space to squeeze in front of you as they try to make their way to the turn lane? Or do you think they should have prepared themselves for the turn? We don’t hold the baby responsible for dropping the pacifier but our choice to do good may be affected by our harsh criticism. Do we value being judgmental more than being generous?
When it is easy to do good, it is easy for me to feel good about doing a good thing. However, I believe that goodness demands from us to do good when it is difficult to do good in order to truly do the right thing.
We are all just human beings and we need to actively choose if we want to be good or not. Being a good person is not an automatic human quality. We need to decide whether we practice goodness, or we don’t. We must decide each time and keep making the decision to be good.
It is not because we are tempted to allow our intellectual minds to determine if we blame someone for not thinking ahead about making the left turn that makes us a bad person. It is choosing to act with our mind and our heart and our spirit in concert that helps be a good person.
There was a time when I was seriously struggling with being unkind, first in my mind, then my heart, and finally in my soul or choosing the blessings of the trinity of mind, heart, and spirit creating virtue.
During the nearly 10-year period of reconciling my children’s decision to estrange themselves from me, I experienced an unfamiliar hollowness that slowly enveloped my life. There was something at work in my soul that I did not understand. I felt that I lost a connection with other people and with the world which included my love for the earth, the plants, the outdoor animals. I now believe that I went numb with the loss of my spirit.
I found myself thinking bitter thoughts about people. The person who cut me off on the road, the contractor who wouldn’t listen, my husband who came home late for the third time in a week. I could literally feel the weight of the toxicity furrowing my brow and erasing my smile.
Could I change my mind and heart despite the state of my wounded being? Would I allow the effects of the estrangement bury my spirit and therefore darken my goodness? Did I want my daily dose of emotional energy devoted to building contempt towards myself, other people, life?
Eventually, I started wondering. Did the next person who cut me off on the road have to go to the bathroom really bad? After listening to the contractor, I could ask him to listen to me. I told my husband I was glad he was home. And I felt better.
My children cut me out of their lives. They won’t give me a chance to listen or listen to me. They won’t ever come home.
I started wondering what would happen to the way that I felt, every day, if I applied goodness in my heart for them. I had to open the door to my intellectual mind and allow my heart and spirit to enter the room. I spent enough time thinking about the why and the what happened. Now I needed to think about and feel what Saint Francis was saying in his prayer that begins with “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”. He continues by saying, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.”
When I wondered about how change could make a difference in me, I decided to substitute my existing course of thinking. Zoroastrianism's core teachings include following the Threefold Path of Asha: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. I began to challenge my conviction that my children ‘coming back’ to me would make all the difference in how I felt. That I would begin to smile and laugh easily again-if they only wanted me back as their Mother. What I came to understand was that the only change that would make a difference was plotting a course to reach my goodness again. Because of my sorrow and mental confusion, I was becoming a person who spent too much time dwelling on the negative feelings my loss was generating. The adversity did create differences in me. I had to remember that I could take with me those differences and uncover the Self I wished to be again. And that Self was one that prioritized living a life with goodness.
I got deeply wounded and I will be wounded again. I find that if I take care of my wounds, with compassion for myself, I don’t have to feel a grievance towards those that have wounded me. My children are as human as I am human and will meet their own crossroads. “And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned” (Saint Francis).
Loving my children deeply was always the right thing to do. I can continue to do so even though I have some serious scarring. Scarring from what happened to me and scarring from what I did to myself. Goodness helped me make a life-enriching choice. I love myself again. Thank godness!
My Mother, born in Poland but raised in France, was famous for her malapropisms. She would say, “hahatack” instead of “heart attack”. She called my first boyfriend a “bump” instead of a “bum”. And when taken by surprise, she would exclaim, “Oh, my godness” instead of Oh, my goodness!" I think in this last example, her verbal mistake was actually most accurate.
There was a time when I was losing my God-ness by disconnecting from my goodness.
What do we know about goodness as a human value?
We feel the goodness of a person when we experience someone letting us go first in the grocery line. (We all want to get out of there, now that our cart is full, and our stomachs are often empty.) We witness goodness when we see a young child crouch down to pet the dog while looking up with a smile. We hear goodness when a waitress patiently explains the menu while we know she has repeated herself many times before. It doesn’t seem to take much to be a person who chooses goodness. Goodness is generosity and kindness and doing the right thing. It is defined as a virtue that we can learn by behaving with principled guidelines.
In the adult world, we are challenged at every turn as to whether we walk the path of goodness. What do you do when you are walking hurriedly down the street and a baby reflexively drops her pacifier right in your path? Oh wait. That might be too easy for you to do good. In traffic, do you give that car in the next lane some space to squeeze in front of you as they try to make their way to the turn lane? Or do you think they should have prepared themselves for the turn? We don’t hold the baby responsible for dropping the pacifier but our choice to do good may be affected by our harsh criticism. Do we value being judgmental more than being generous?
When it is easy to do good, it is easy for me to feel good about doing a good thing. However, I believe that goodness demands from us to do good when it is difficult to do good in order to truly do the right thing.
We are all just human beings and we need to actively choose if we want to be good or not. Being a good person is not an automatic human quality. We need to decide whether we practice goodness, or we don’t. We must decide each time and keep making the decision to be good.
It is not because we are tempted to allow our intellectual minds to determine if we blame someone for not thinking ahead about making the left turn that makes us a bad person. It is choosing to act with our mind and our heart and our spirit in concert that helps be a good person.
There was a time when I was seriously struggling with being unkind, first in my mind, then my heart, and finally in my soul or choosing the blessings of the trinity of mind, heart, and spirit creating virtue.
During the nearly 10-year period of reconciling my children’s decision to estrange themselves from me, I experienced an unfamiliar hollowness that slowly enveloped my life. There was something at work in my soul that I did not understand. I felt that I lost a connection with other people and with the world which included my love for the earth, the plants, the outdoor animals. I now believe that I went numb with the loss of my spirit.
I found myself thinking bitter thoughts about people. The person who cut me off on the road, the contractor who wouldn’t listen, my husband who came home late for the third time in a week. I could literally feel the weight of the toxicity furrowing my brow and erasing my smile.
Could I change my mind and heart despite the state of my wounded being? Would I allow the effects of the estrangement bury my spirit and therefore darken my goodness? Did I want my daily dose of emotional energy devoted to building contempt towards myself, other people, life?
Eventually, I started wondering. Did the next person who cut me off on the road have to go to the bathroom really bad? After listening to the contractor, I could ask him to listen to me. I told my husband I was glad he was home. And I felt better.
My children cut me out of their lives. They won’t give me a chance to listen or listen to me. They won’t ever come home.
I started wondering what would happen to the way that I felt, every day, if I applied goodness in my heart for them. I had to open the door to my intellectual mind and allow my heart and spirit to enter the room. I spent enough time thinking about the why and the what happened. Now I needed to think about and feel what Saint Francis was saying in his prayer that begins with “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”. He continues by saying, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.”
When I wondered about how change could make a difference in me, I decided to substitute my existing course of thinking. Zoroastrianism's core teachings include following the Threefold Path of Asha: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. I began to challenge my conviction that my children ‘coming back’ to me would make all the difference in how I felt. That I would begin to smile and laugh easily again-if they only wanted me back as their Mother. What I came to understand was that the only change that would make a difference was plotting a course to reach my goodness again. Because of my sorrow and mental confusion, I was becoming a person who spent too much time dwelling on the negative feelings my loss was generating. The adversity did create differences in me. I had to remember that I could take with me those differences and uncover the Self I wished to be again. And that Self was one that prioritized living a life with goodness.
I got deeply wounded and I will be wounded again. I find that if I take care of my wounds, with compassion for myself, I don’t have to feel a grievance towards those that have wounded me. My children are as human as I am human and will meet their own crossroads. “And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned” (Saint Francis).
Loving my children deeply was always the right thing to do. I can continue to do so even though I have some serious scarring. Scarring from what happened to me and scarring from what I did to myself. Goodness helped me make a life-enriching choice. I love myself again. Thank godness!
RSS Feed